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Ruth Amundsen · Joined: 18 Jan 2006 Posts: 15 Location: NASA Langley

Made an interesting discovery today about AutoCAD file size. (This is in AutoCAD 2012, but probably holds for other versions also).

I had a file that blew up in size from 1 MB to 15 MB when I pulled in some very detailed geometry in STEP file format. When I was done with the geometry, I deleted it, but didn’t get the file space back.

Here was what I had to do:
First get rid of the geometry you don’t need.
Do PU (PURGE) on the command line, and click on purge nested items & confirm purge, and purge everything except layer AM_VIEWS. You may have to do the purge several times in a row to get everything gone.
Then if you want to be really miserly on file size, set ISAVEPERCENT to 0 before you do the save. (That sets AutoCAD to not do an incremental save, but instead to do a full save. If you want to save time on future saves, set it back to its default of 50 when you are done).

Then your file size should be back to the smaller level.

DPBell · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2012 1:45 pm Post subject:

Thank you, Ruth.

I just wanted to add that if the geometry is for reference only (e.g. using it as scaffolding for Thermal Desktop primitives), then you can use external references (XREF) to display the geometry in your model file without actually importing the geometry into your model file. Then there is nothing to delete. When you are done, you can simply detach the XREF.